Adam Ezekiel spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva from the Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, after he was wounded in a shooting incident near Har Bracha on Tuesday.
Adam admitted, “I feel like today is a miracle. I feel really grateful to be alive right now. I'm feeling that I’ve definitely had better days, but Baruch Hashem [thanks to God], I’m still here. It's not easy getting shot, but, you know, they say ‘whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger’. So, I’m ready to come back stronger.”
Adam recalled, “We were on a group trip and we were touring the West Bank [Judea and Samaria], looking at all kinds of sites and at one point we got to a viewpoint to see the city of Shechem [Nablus]. This is also the place where the grave of Joseph from the Bible is located. We were looking out and I had this feeling, not only there, but on other parts of the trip, that we were always on this high point and the Arab villages were always below us. We are talking about hundreds and, in this case, tens of thousands of homes. I kept thinking that we are such easy targets. It doesn't even take much effort to aim and shoot at us. Someone could be drinking a coffee, looking out their window with sniper rifle and shoot at us, and that's exactly what happened.”
Adam described how they we just sitting there, some people were singing and dancing and, “then suddenly, it just happened. There was no warning. I just heard a bang and that bang felt like it was from me. I don't know if it was the bullet or my body, but I heard an explosion and my arm was in extreme pain. I didn’t know if I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t quite sure. I didn’t know what this pain was. I’d never felt anything like this before. I'm a personal trainer and I've been through all kinds of injuries, but nothing like this. This felt to me like it was a bullet. I just fell on my knees and started sweating and got nauseous.”
Adam said that at the beginning, “People didn’t even believe that I was hit. I said, ‘I'm hit,’ but I wasn't screaming. At first, they thought that maybe my phone had exploded but I showed them my phone in my hand. They carried on having a discussion and I said, ‘Can you just get an ambulance.’ So, thank God, they brought an ambulance, and they took me out. The thing that I was most scared of is that because I am a personal trainer and my wife is a student, and I have four kids, ‘How on earth am I going to pay my bills? I’ve got a mortgage,’ but God is great. God is with me and I know I’m going to be okay. I'm not too worried. Everything is going to be fine.”
Adam was part of a group visiting Samaria to learn about the importance of Samaria, the idea of Samaria, the complexities of the area, and following the attack said he believes that, “We all need to unite as Jewish people. I think that we all have to compromise. I feel like everybody has their side and nobody really wants to budge on their side. I think we just got listen to each other, and say, ‘Okay, how can I give a little bit, to get a little bit.’ Like a marriage, or when you’re a parent, you’ve got to listen to what each person wants, and work it out. I think we all have to unite, because when we not united, we’re weak and that's definitely a huge issue.”
Adam continued, “I think also that in order to have more peace and love amongst each other, I feel like the Jewish Orthodox community should be inviting the non-Orthodox community over for holidays, so that we can experience each other’s energy. It’s always good to break bread. I feel like the Arabs that live in Israel, who have it good here and are happy, should speak up, like NAS Daily, like Yoseph Haddad. They really should be speaking up and telling the more violent members of their community to stop being like that. They should really tell them that this is not going to make anything go forward. It’s going to be bad for them and bad for us.”
“In the current situation, maybe they are winning, because they get a salary every month when they murder a Jew and they also apparently get some virgins in heaven. So, I think that all of that needs to change. The education system has to drastically change in terms of the Arab education. If there is somebody teaching in a mosque or a school to kill Jews, that is not a school or a mosque anymore. It has become a terrorist institution and it should be shut down immediately and the education must be governed, either by Israel or a foreign body that believes in peace, like Dubai, the US, something like that. Those are my insights that I feel really help us make big moves. It's all about education. I believe that they hate us. The Arabs really hate us.”